In this Issue:

Diocese of Lexington reaches out to Survivors of Katrina

St. Raphael's first ever J2A Pilgrims Rock Ireland

Part of the Heart of Our Mission: Announcements

Solo Flight ritual: the art of loving

EYE: Can You Catch The Spirit Off The Beaten Path?

Hurricane Katrina News and Notes

Commentaries

From the Bishop: Matthew Goes to College

Reflection: Finding a home in the storm

X-ercizing: Community, solidarity, and humanity

Diocesan Calendar

Past Issues

From the Bishop: Matthew Goes to College

My son Matthew, known to us as Mattie, went off to college a couple of weeks ago. I have been kidding him all summer by telling people (in his presence) that he had decided not to go to college but to go to the University of Alabama instead. When the subject has come up at home, I have remarked about my surprise at him going to Alabama since all these years I thought he could read. I have told him that the reason they call it Bama is that no one there knows how to spell Alabama. Of course, I was working out my anxiety about his leaving home, and I apologize to all Alabamians. He seemed to understand with characteristic and compassionate good humor. When he went for orientation in July, he brought me back a Bama shirt. I wore it to tell him goodbye before he left.

Mattie listed his priorities about choosing a college before he made a college trip last fall with his best friends. They ranked things like academics, majors offered, opportunities to play sports, campus, graduate programs, and fun. Fun was Mattie’s top priority. It has never been mine. Fun wasn’t anywhere on my radar screen when I chose a college. Mattie is a different person than I. And that is what makes him so wonderful.

I try to take a trip with my sons each year, just the boys. So I spent the first part of my vacation on a father-son trip with my baby boy. Due the generosity of some airline friends, we went to Rome. Mattie, I think, ultimately will want to be a chef, and he is particularly interested in Italian cooking. Thus, the choice of location. It was the trip itself, though, and not the destination, that was important for me, and I hope for him, a last chance to spend some time together before he left home.
We saw the Forum, the Coliseum, the Circus Maximus, and all the major basilicas. We walked down the Via Veneto and saw the Spanish Steps and the Trevi Fountain at night. We saw Michelangelo’s “Moses.” It was very cool, Mattie agreed.

But Mattie’s favorite thing was the Vatican. I found this a little ironic given that the Catholic school he once attended was less than open to a little boy like Mattie who couldn’t sit still, who neither ran nor walked down the halls but skipped, who made it his mission in life to give teachers who didn’t like him a good reason, and who was just about expelled for being in the wrong carpool line in the afternoon (no kidding).

He complained a little about the long, winding queue to get into the Vatican Museums, but he was a good sport about it. Once inside, I got a big surprise. He was enthralled. He had a particular interest in ancient Greek and Roman statuary. Who knew? He was captivated by the Raphael Rooms, especially “The School of Athens.” And he seemed to be able to spend an eternity in the Sistine Chapel. He explained “The Last Judgment” to me based on a paper he had written in high school. He listened intently to the audio guide’s explanation of the ceiling. He was fonder, though, of the paintings on the upper walls that were not by Michelangelo. I had no idea he could tell the difference.

But what really got him was St. Peter’s Basilica. He went in and his jaw hit the floor. He passed reverently by the tomb of John Paul II. (Well almost. He did take a fl ash picture). He listened with interest when I explained the ecumenical spirit of John XXIII while looking at the glass casket containing his preserved body. We stood together gazing at the “Pieta,” as his brother and I had done three years before and as his grandmother and I had done over 40 years before. He was amazed by the high altar. He slid his hand along the foot of the bronze statue of St. Peter, rubbed smooth by generations before him. He listened attentively to my explanations of iconography and the lives of saints he saw in paintings but had never heard of before. He declared the whole experience “[slightly inappropriate modifier deleted] awesome.”

He is, after all, my son, as different as he is in so many ways. There is much that we share. Still, he is his own person. He was born, after all, to be just that, who he is and not a copy of me. And there couldn’t be much of a relationship were it otherwise. It was not the interests that Mattie and I shared that made the trip so special to me. It was that I went with a very separate person named Mattie who was given to me to love. It is the separateness that actually makes the relationship possible. Separateness is the difference between love and narcissism. Our relationship is changing from one in which Mattie looks up to me to one in which we look each other in the eye. That is truly wonderful.

If only we Christians could remember in times of differences between us that difference is to be celebrated and neither denied nor repressed. It is so because separateness is the key of God’s own life. Were it otherwise, the Holy Trinity would be a glob of sameness, not much of a Trinity at all. The unity is only possible because of the diversity and not in spite of it. It is about looking each other in the eye and not about looking through the same eyes. It is the distinction between the persons of the Trinity that defines what God is like, and it is that distinction that makes love, which also defines what God is like, possible in the first place.

I got a little glimpse of what God is like on our trip to Rome. Awesome indeed. Roll Tide!

Agape,

Advocate Online Staff:

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